The Things They Left Behind: Photographs From Poland's Lost Jews

By JOSEPH BERGER

Published: February 28, 2007

They are exquisitely ordinary family snapshots: six young men and women on the beach, playfully arranged in a pyramid; a bourgeois family flaunting its Sabbath best of fur-lined topcoats and rakishly angled hats; a dark-haired Orthodox mother with an infant cradled in her arms and her five children, three barefoot, lined up stiffly in front of a tumbledown shack.

There are dozens of other photographs just as posed and stilted, and strangers scanning them might barely pause for a second glance -- except for one fact. Almost all these Polish Jews, rich and poor alike, would be dead within a few years, massacred in the Nazi camps or ghettoes or consumed by the war. One woman in the beach pyramid, a caption says, perished in the Soviet Union, searching for her husband as they fled the Nazis.

Elie Wiesel, when he saw this homespun collection, is said to have told friends that you want to grab these people and warn them: ''Run away! Do something!'' But of course most Jews did not perceive the scope of the menace they faced.

The subjects, mostly overlooked in their lifetimes, have been memorialized -- ''retrieved from oblivion,'' as the collection's founder, Golda Tencer, put it -- in an exhibition of 450 sepia-toned and black-and-white photographs that will be on display starting tomorrow at the Yeshiva University Museum, in the Center for Jewish History in Manhattan. The show, ''And I Still See Their Faces: The Vanished World of Polish Jews,'' has been seen over the last decade in two dozen cities around the world, including Warsaw, Los Angeles and Detroit.

What makes the exhibition extraordinary for those who know of everyday bigotry in prewar Poland is that 70 percent of the photographs were provided by gentiles. Indeed, the way so many photographs were salvaged suggests a more complex portrait of prewar life than is often depicted -- less anti-Semitic, perhaps -- with relationships between gentiles and Jews that were often affectionate and respectful.

Letters the contributors sent with the images indicate that many Jews turned photographs over to their gentile neighbors as they were about to be deported because they sensed that doom might lie ahead and wanted someone to remember that they had lived.

''When the Germans were about to take them away from Opatow, they gave my mother these photographs for her to keep,'' wrote one contributor, Jozef Kaczmarczyk, adding, as if speaking for the Jewish friends, ''Perhaps someone will survive, and this will be a keepsake.''

The neighbors or their children held onto the photographs for decades, haunted, or fascinated, not just by the disappearance of the Jews but also by the virtual extinguishing of a culture that had flourished alongside theirs for centuries. The letters show Poles expressing gratitude for the tailor who sewed a First Communion dress, the baker who baked their bread, a circus performer who lightened daily life with high jinks.

''They had three children -- Zosia, Monika and Liba,'' wrote an unidentified correspondent about a photograph of one couple. ''I am sending it to you, thus certifying that a Mr. and Mrs. Rajch once existed and lived happily in Kalisz.''

The exhibition, with photographs stretching back to the late 19th century, depicts a world far more assimilated than the shtetl typically portrayed, one that is occasionally even prosperous. There are photographs of dapper poseurs as well as skinny yeshiva boys, vacation revelers as well as bedraggled water-carriers. They wear bowlers, not just the Sabbath fur hats known as shtreimel. One fashionable wife of a lawyer poses with an elegant pair of King Charles spaniels.

Life in prewar Eastern Europe has already been well photographed by artists like Roman Vishniac (whose 1983 book was called ''A Vanished World''). But here there is a poignancy to the photographs' amateurishness and to the pride written on many faces that they could afford to have their photographs taken.

''These are pictures of simple people that history would have forgotten otherwise,'' said Ms. Tencer in a telephone interview from Poland. ''My idea is that we have given these people another life.''

What can sometimes startle viewers about the banal photographs is the text from an accompanying letter. A photograph of 30 schoolchildren, two of the girls in sailor blouses, with their teachers in Kozowo in June 1939 looks like any posed classroom eager for the coming vacation. But the caption about the class's young Jews says that sometime after the war began that September, ''They took them out of town to the quarries and shot them to death.''

Showing a visitor around the galleries, Sylvia Herskowitz, the museum's director, said, ''I'm filled with overwhelming sadness when I come here, because you realize that the children never made it.''

Ms. Tencer, a 57-year-old actress, started her Shalom Foundation to sustain the embers of Jewish culture in a land that before World War II had 3.3 million Jews. After the Holocaust and a 1968 spasm of government anti-Semitism, Poland's Jewish population dwindled to near extinction -- perhaps 5,000 people at its nadir. Occasionally someone would send her a prewar photograph of Jews, so in 1994 she appealed on radio and in newspaper ads for others. She was inundated -- 9,000, at latest count.

Ms. Tencer said she might have been inspired to collect photographs because her father, an inmate at Auschwitz and Mauthausen who was his family's only survivor, had no photographs of his relatives to give him a palpable sense of their lives. After the war, her father remained in Poland because he ''wanted to be the keeper of the graves that didn't exist,'' she said. She followed suit, the photographs allowing her figuratively to tend hundreds of graves.

As the exhibition has traveled, Jewish visitors have contributed photographs of their prewar relatives. One woman submitted a rough one-inch cameo of her mother that she had hidden in her mouth and underfoot during two of the ''selections'' by the notorious Auschwitz doctor Josef Mengele that divided inmates between those who would work and those who would die.

Rivka Ostaszewski, a 56-year-old Polish ?gr?ho lives in New Jersey, sent in the only photograph of a relative of her mother: her uncle Eli, one of nine of her mother's siblings whom she had never met.

Lilka Elbaum, a Polish ?gr?iving in Boston who helped organize the exhibitions there and in New York, submitted a photograph of her parents and the Poles who saved them, which is included in an album accompanying the show. While her parents survived, she said, she has always believed that they ''were destroyed by the experience'' of war and the losses of their kin. The photographs help sketch a more concrete picture of their prewar lives.

''They never recovered, and I want to know them before that,'' Ms. Elbaum said.

Ms. Tencer hopes her exhibition will help fuel a resurgence of Jewish life in Poland. She takes heart that as a result of her efforts, a nearby church whose basement book shop sold anti-Semitic tracts closed the shop and will join her foundation in a festival of Jewish life.

''The gist of my entire work is to show this country what they have lost by losing the Jews,'' she said.

Ms. Elbaum thinks the exhibition, with its unnerving faces, sends a message to Holocaust deniers like the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. ''If there was no Holocaust,'' she said, ''where are all these people?''

''And I Still See Their Faces'' continues through June 24 at theYeshiva University Museum, in the Center for Jewish History, 15 West 16th Street, Flatiron district; (212) 294-8330, yumuseum.org.

Photos: Golda Tencer, the collector of the photographs in ''And I Still See Their Faces,'' in front of one showing her grandmother holding her mother. (Photo by Don Hogan Charles/The New York Times); Justyna Goldman, with two unidentified children. Submitted by her son, who wrote, ''This is the only photograph of my mother.''; The exhibition includes images of Jewish life in prewar Poland, like this beach scene, that go beyond those of the ghetto or the shtetl. (Photographs from Yeshiva University Museum)